Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...recent movies (M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye) are like model kits. Each one comes in little pieces, some of which are lovingly and intricately fashioned. Each is made to scale for a specific genre: the service comedy, the western, the private-eye melodrama. Altman encloses no instructions, though. That is the challenge and the catch, and accounts in part for the appeal his films exercise for many critics. It is not that Altman movies are open-ended so much as that they are any-ended. They can be assembled in many ways...
...interesting. It bombards the audience with passion, adventure, crime and comedy--all in a comfortable domestic setting designed to lend an air of familiarity to the bizarre events. The central character is so colorful that he almost hurts your eyes, and the violent reactions he provokes could furnish enough melodrama for at least three full-length plays...
...author of this moral melodrama, Ron Bitto '74, already has one Harvard production--John's Diner, featured at last year's Quincy House Arts Festival--under his belt. His dialogue still sounds annoyingly bookish, sprinkled with words like "precautious" and "warpedness." Such a style is perfectly suited to Grandfather's verbose monologues and tall tales, but it doesn't sound right coming from the other more down-to-earth characters. Bitto tosses in an occasional four-letter word, but this ploy fails to add any realism...
THURSDAY: Valley of the Dolls. 1967. A movie that makes the average soap opera look like "Last Year at Marienbad." Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, and Sharon (Manson victim) Tate flounder through the slings and arrows of this outrageous melodrama like wounded animals. Worst movie of the sixties award. CH. 7. 9 p.m. Color...
There is much more to Kieu than escapist melodrama. Written by a renowned Vietnamese classicist named Nguyen Du (1766-1820), the poem in Vietnamese has a wide range of wordplay. The meter is a flowing iambic called luk-bat, full of rhyming and nearly as easy to memorize as a song. Much of this is unavoidably lost in the otherwise excellent English translation by Huynh Sanh Thong, a Vietnamese scholar who has lived in the U.S. all his adult life. Jaded Western readers who may find Kieu's plight unconvincing can still enjoy the poem for its language, especially...